Writing and digital technologies have always been enmeshed with one another. Currently, the use of virtual reality (VR) systems and applications continues to grow across both professional and popular venues, leading to a number of questions researchers have yet to ask about how we might use these technologies for writing and writing classrooms. Based on a process-focused research approach encompassing headset recordings that captured over a year of various writing tasks in VR, this study reveals some of the ways virtual reality may be used specifically by researchers in writing and communication studies, especially in terms of invention and collaborative practices. Theories of virtual reality animate findings in three areas—invention, collaboration, and friction—and the findings raise questions about researching VR in writing-based classrooms.

Relying on rhetorical analysis, this article explores the rhetoric and ethics of a particular type of designer- and player-created technical communication genre, video patch notes, to further explore how various technical communication genres structure the experience of play. By providing a case study of official video patch notes for the game Overwatch in combination with Youtube user dinoflask's satirical fan made videos, the article examines both developers’ communication practices and the ways in which players creatively negotiate and re-purpose these practices in order to illustrate how such tactical technical communication remixes sustain a subtle dialogue between players and developers. This dialogue in particular illuminates pain points between stakeholders (in this case, discrepancies between developer intent and player experience) in ways that could potentially offer a means of persuading particularly ideologically fixed audiences, highlighting how practitioners might use tactical technical communication with activist intent.

Responding to the call for embracing mêtis in the classroom, this piece puts scholarship on embodiment and emergent gameplay in conversation with one another to explore a potential means of cultivating mêtic intelligence in the composition classroom by empirically examining how the open world game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild ( BOTW ) scaffolds mêtic intelligence and encourages mêtic strategies in its players. Founded in Jay Dolmage’s understanding of mêtis as a means to turn the tables on those with greater bie (brute strength) and Karen Kopelson’s use of mêtis as a means of subtle resistance, this piece takes a mixed methods approach and utilizes interview data to see what design elements of BOTW may be able to be brought into composition course design to help cultivate cunning in our students both inside and beyond the classroom.

Communication and collaboration are essential parts of the game development process. However, during the global pandemic, the shift to remote work marked a sudden change in how developers could communicate and collaborate with one another, as usual ad-hoc conversations that happen in physical offices were nonexistent. Based on a partnership grant study with the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), this piece focuses on the results of a survey that examined developers' mental health and productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings suggest that most game developers want a hybrid or fully remote position even after pandemic conditions subside. Failure to address the pandemic's impact on the game development industry risks ignoring a rich area of technical communication complicated by, and responsive to, hybrid workplaces.

This study surveyed and analyzed feminist methodologies in four composition journals across ten years. Our findings offer a number of important checks upon methodological and epistemological conversations in composition research, particularly how the methods we choose demonstrate our attention to social justice, the materialities of research practice, and the situatedness of knowledge claims.

This graphic meditation on issues of cultural relevance and accessibility in comic-based health communication texts presents the web of rhetorical considerations inherent in creating culturally accessible health communication texts. Applying recent technical communication theories related to social justice this article will examine contemporary instances of comics being used as health communication tools for culturally diverse patient populations. The authors offer original drawings and text for the article.